From a corporate perspective I would agree that the whole issue of certificates and signing is a tempting way to entice development, but it didn't work. It's dead.
I think there is a whole bunch more to this story than Nokia or Symbian are prepared to say in public.
The root cause is the consumer, they see "Free phone, shiny, pretty colours, you can take it home right now!, just sign here, here and here, initial there, and don't forget to dot your i's"
If they went to the store across the street and purchased the phone outright, they could have the full range of features supported on the phone, no sim locks, and the upswing being they wouldn't end up throwing away enough cash for the carriers to buy 3 extra phones and a BMW over the length of the contract.
Financially they are often a few hundred dollars better off if they just buy it at full price.
Sim locks are not token any longer. It took near on two years before anyone could unlock BB5 based phones without the aid of the carriers, then another year before some internal bickering meant that the code and methodology was exposed for all the back room dealers to get in on the act and offer the same service for a few dollars a trick. Prior to that the average cost was anywhere from a few hundred dollars per unit to a few thousand. Only a few people had the ability to unlock phones, so they commanded a high price.
Not only has DRM been broken, so has Symbian's S60V3, in several different ways. For Nokia phones this means any file with DRM is easily copied straight off the phone minus the DRM. Drag and drop.
It is now simplistic in the extreme to bypass the whole signed application requirement. No more caged directory structure, no more annoying prompts, as a result it's now easy to pull out the hex editor and tweak things around, recalculate the hashes, UID's, and SID, then enjoy the goodness that is symbian exposed.
There are about 180 more countries in the world that have either invested directly in Chinese manufacturing, or benefit from Chinese exports.
I should imagine the US would go bankrupt long before China does.
That said, they do have some smart people building their encryption gear for their military and government, I seriously doubt they don't have anyone on payroll either domestic or foreign smart enough to pull off a little unauthorized access from time to time.
I have Maya 2008 running in a pretty standard Ubuntu install - I have to use metacity though, compiz locks up. Nothing too weird about getting it to run other than converting RPM to deb.
Jammers are quite effective, otherwise most states and a handful of countries wouldn't be so quick to ban them.
RADAR by its very nature can be detected far outside its own detection range, the way it is employed in speed measurement makes it easily defeated.
Laser takes a small fraction of time to aim and provide speed readings, with this length of time, and given the right positioning of sensors on the vehicle, it becomes fairly trivial to defeat as well.
Some speed cameras now also feed in to a database so that anyone defeating any camera on the network more than a couple of times will then receive an inspection/fine/impounding of their vehicle based on photographs of their plate number.
I guess the next step is more complex circuitry. Give the vehicle the ability to measure the frequency of the radar and send back a stronger signal shifted just the right amount so that it will ensure the radar shows they are travelling at a particular speed. Maybe this already exists.
No enforced speed limits where I live in the world.
I have no sense of smell. Prior to about 16 years of age I honestly thought people were making it up. I thought the sense of smell was all some big elaborate joke, a conspiracy against me personally.
Yup, and 34 seconds later you can have a brand new account with access to all the same services. Sure, you have the hassle of changing your email address, but I think people are used to this happening already.
Your Nokia has dozens of background applications running at any point in time. Some of these are not so friendly on the battery while others don't make much of a difference at all. A smart phone that can last a week without a charge? What model phone do you have exactly? I've had loads of Nokia handsets, the only type that would have a hope of running for a week are the S40 kind. These are not 'smart phones' though.
Both my N80 and N95 will last about 2 days with everything switched off, and they do this only if I don't use them at all.
I don't buy your story with the information you have given thus far sir. Sorry.
The towers identify the phone using IMEI initially, then the phones are assigned a fairly random ID after that. These are easily tracked if you are able to watch most major parts of the exchange, and you can bet this is happening. Multiple towers can also identify the location of the phone down to a fairly precise area. I doubt the military is trying to target individual phones from their choppers or UAV's. I'd personally suggest the Taliban have cottoned on to the fact that the SIGINT guys are picking them off from the comfort of their padded leather recliners back at the NSA HQ.
Yes, along with every other metallic item in the area. The tech does not exist to do this at a range of any more than a few meters. Anything else is propaganda.
2) all cellphones, whether active or not, can be located (by sending out signals which will provoke a passive response from their antenna's), over a short range (but still a few miles, given enough power in the transmitter)
You just made that up.
If by a few miles you actually mean a few meters, then yes, this is possible. At a distance of a few miles a transmitter of this kind would have to pump out some serious energy as you say, but it would also need to have a duty cycle that would allow it to listen for responses, it would then need to filter those responses and categorize one from another amongst millions of signatures received. An impossible task since a cell phone will give off the same type of radiated energy as every single other moderately complex electronic circuit in the area. All metallic objects will radiate energy.
No sane military would employ this type of technology anyway, their transmitter would be visible for a hundred kilometers in every direction. RADAR systems are typically the first targets to be taken out in any fight, if the operators are sensible they just switch them off and go home.
The internet happened, that's what. Good thing it did too, makes propaganda and hatred a little more difficult to dictate in to the minds of an entire country.
Not quite the same as what you've linked to, but I used to have an old logitech split keyboard with touchpad that knew the difference between one, two or three fingers on the pad at the same time. I bought it maybe 11 years ago now. Was excellent for middle or right clicking. Died after several years of heavy use though. It was one solid keyboard, I miss it.:-(
I'm not posting as anonymous for obvious reasons, I'm a disgruntled ex defence signals directorate drone. I worked with quite a few domestic and foreign 3 letter agencies during my long stay with these characters. You are absolutely being deceived if you buy the little snippets of info you are given by your leaders.
Intel collection platforms are no secret, either in purpose or in functionality. The information is readily available to anyone attentive enough to cut through the crap. Google has it all. One thing I learned over the years is that individuals know what they are doing, management struggle to get another rung up the ladder and will do anything to look better than you, and the little boys club at the top have their politics. You know where these leaks come from? If you are a low level nobody then you go to jail, middle level managers get sent off to some red neck field site in the desert where they can't screw anything up much worse than it already is. So who does that leave you with?
If you are a creature of common sense and dispense with the patriotic blindness for a minute, you'll see that absolutely nothing stays secret. Nothing.
This is just plain old erosion of rights instigated by some fall guy in the executive branch who was probably just scratching someone elses itch.
The process is a little different to what you might think. These imagery birds produce a constant stream of pictures every time their solar panels are lit up with sunlight, a few less if in shade. Obviously areas of interest can be pinpointed as the satellite passes overhead, but these things rarely float around idle.
A warrant might give some imagery weenie the legal go ahead to distribute specific files, but that doesn't mean the pictures are only taken when a warrant is present. Over the years 'real time' has expanded to include 'sifting' through huge amounts of data storage to pick out not only a location of interest, but also a time of interest.
If the warrant doesn't include a time frame, then you can bet your backside it will be assumed to mean an unlimited capacity to view any imagery for the location of interest until the warrant expires.
Depending upon the acquisition method and storage, you might only have a few days of historical info, or you might have years.
Since c is most likely a constant we can say: something that is x light years away is y years old (actually, x = y for most cases, I think.
It seems illogical and improbable that X would equal Y. An object 4 light years away isn't necessarily 4 years old, it could just as easily be 4 billion years old. Unless the light from this galaxy 12.8 billion light years away just happened to come in to view on the Hubble sensor where a few moments before there was nothing, then that light could have easily been streaming past us for billions of years already. Who's to know?
I really don't understand the whole 'age of the universe' thing - there are still a lot of assumptions in those equations.
I guess you were making a slightly unrelated point:-) Anyway, Australia has had biometric passports since 2005, the application process is virtually unchanged from when I got my first 10 year passport in 1990. I can't even remotely begin to imagine how this erodes my rights in any way. I'm sure someone will enlighten me though. They take my name, date of birth, place of birth, my picture, then make a digital fingerprint of it which is stored on a chip wedged inside page 17.
All in all they ask for very little information. I have to give more detail just to get a video rental card, so aside from my travel history which is easily obtained anyway, there's no additional information that the ambulance chasers don't already have.
While you didn't say this - someone a couple of posts above you did. "Remember: the NSA are bumbling fools that couldn't lead two nuns in one minute of silent prayer" Speaking as a disgruntled ex 3 letter agency drone, I have to say that the conspiracy theories make for good movies, books, drunken late night stories, and that is all they do.
It's not necessary to make any assumptions, just a little critical and rational thinking will get you 90% of the way. Is it possible is a better question. Could a 3 letter agency have a large black tube that wraps around a bit of fiber and soaks up the noise of strained photons losing some energy by banging around a sharp bend? Does anything remotely similar exist in the commercial world? Have any physicists ever published papers on the subject? Can I buy a kit to do the same thing from radio shack yet?
Surprisingly, google, along with much corporate salivation at huge gravy train government contracts, has resulted in a lot of product specifications becoming well within easy reach of the comfort of ones computer. People don't keep secrets very well.
New and non-conforming will easily buy you a few years in the world of government bureaucracy and the child like stupidity of upper level managers. Always.
Why not use a subdomain if the site is for demonstration purposes? Seems like a complete waste of money and potentially good domain names. You register them and when they expire some idiot snaps them up and uses them for link farming.
It's not about a few dollars, it's about laying waste to the whole domain registration process. What good is it if the only thing left to register is a string of random characters.
Slashdot Mirror
Stable door, wide open already sir. Symbian platform security is easily bypassed. http://www.symbian-freak.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18252
From a corporate perspective I would agree that the whole issue of certificates and signing is a tempting way to entice development, but it didn't work. It's dead.
I think there is a whole bunch more to this story than Nokia or Symbian are prepared to say in public.
The root cause is the consumer, they see "Free phone, shiny, pretty colours, you can take it home right now!, just sign here, here and here, initial there, and don't forget to dot your i's"
If they went to the store across the street and purchased the phone outright, they could have the full range of features supported on the phone, no sim locks, and the upswing being they wouldn't end up throwing away enough cash for the carriers to buy 3 extra phones and a BMW over the length of the contract.
Financially they are often a few hundred dollars better off if they just buy it at full price.
Sim locks are not token any longer. It took near on two years before anyone could unlock BB5 based phones without the aid of the carriers, then another year before some internal bickering meant that the code and methodology was exposed for all the back room dealers to get in on the act and offer the same service for a few dollars a trick. Prior to that the average cost was anywhere from a few hundred dollars per unit to a few thousand. Only a few people had the ability to unlock phones, so they commanded a high price.
Not only has DRM been broken, so has Symbian's S60V3, in several different ways. For Nokia phones this means any file with DRM is easily copied straight off the phone minus the DRM. Drag and drop.
It is now simplistic in the extreme to bypass the whole signed application requirement. No more caged directory structure, no more annoying prompts, as a result it's now easy to pull out the hex editor and tweak things around, recalculate the hashes, UID's, and SID, then enjoy the goodness that is symbian exposed.
There are about 180 more countries in the world that have either invested directly in Chinese manufacturing, or benefit from Chinese exports.
I should imagine the US would go bankrupt long before China does.
That said, they do have some smart people building their encryption gear for their military and government, I seriously doubt they don't have anyone on payroll either domestic or foreign smart enough to pull off a little unauthorized access from time to time.
I have Maya 2008 running in a pretty standard Ubuntu install - I have to use metacity though, compiz locks up. Nothing too weird about getting it to run other than converting RPM to deb.
Jammers are quite effective, otherwise most states and a handful of countries wouldn't be so quick to ban them.
RADAR by its very nature can be detected far outside its own detection range, the way it is employed in speed measurement makes it easily defeated.
Laser takes a small fraction of time to aim and provide speed readings, with this length of time, and given the right positioning of sensors on the vehicle, it becomes fairly trivial to defeat as well.
Some speed cameras now also feed in to a database so that anyone defeating any camera on the network more than a couple of times will then receive an inspection/fine/impounding of their vehicle based on photographs of their plate number.
I guess the next step is more complex circuitry. Give the vehicle the ability to measure the frequency of the radar and send back a stronger signal shifted just the right amount so that it will ensure the radar shows they are travelling at a particular speed. Maybe this already exists.
No enforced speed limits where I live in the world.
I have no sense of smell. Prior to about 16 years of age I honestly thought people were making it up. I thought the sense of smell was all some big elaborate joke, a conspiracy against me personally.
Yup, and 34 seconds later you can have a brand new account with access to all the same services. Sure, you have the hassle of changing your email address, but I think people are used to this happening already.
Your Nokia has dozens of background applications running at any point in time. Some of these are not so friendly on the battery while others don't make much of a difference at all. A smart phone that can last a week without a charge? What model phone do you have exactly? I've had loads of Nokia handsets, the only type that would have a hope of running for a week are the S40 kind. These are not 'smart phones' though.
Both my N80 and N95 will last about 2 days with everything switched off, and they do this only if I don't use them at all.
I don't buy your story with the information you have given thus far sir. Sorry.
Apple, they are the new symbian.
Sorry, I'm posting this a little out of thread so that people actually read it.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned mapcenter.
http://mapcenter2.cgpsmapper.com/
There are about 30 open maps listed for the USA. It's rather straight forward and fairly easy to build your own maps, it is a time sink though!
The towers identify the phone using IMEI initially, then the phones are assigned a fairly random ID after that. These are easily tracked if you are able to watch most major parts of the exchange, and you can bet this is happening. Multiple towers can also identify the location of the phone down to a fairly precise area. I doubt the military is trying to target individual phones from their choppers or UAV's. I'd personally suggest the Taliban have cottoned on to the fact that the SIGINT guys are picking them off from the comfort of their padded leather recliners back at the NSA HQ.
Yes, along with every other metallic item in the area. The tech does not exist to do this at a range of any more than a few meters. Anything else is propaganda.
2) all cellphones, whether active or not, can be located (by sending out signals which will provoke a passive response from their antenna's), over a short range (but still a few miles, given enough power in the transmitter)
You just made that up.
If by a few miles you actually mean a few meters, then yes, this is possible. At a distance of a few miles a transmitter of this kind would have to pump out some serious energy as you say, but it would also need to have a duty cycle that would allow it to listen for responses, it would then need to filter those responses and categorize one from another amongst millions of signatures received. An impossible task since a cell phone will give off the same type of radiated energy as every single other moderately complex electronic circuit in the area. All metallic objects will radiate energy.
No sane military would employ this type of technology anyway, their transmitter would be visible for a hundred kilometers in every direction. RADAR systems are typically the first targets to be taken out in any fight, if the operators are sensible they just switch them off and go home.
I say point 2 is busted. What say you?
Well you are just a helpful little rvw today :-)
+3 informative? Are the mods still on crack?
Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. (Quote from linked wikipedia page)
The internet happened, that's what. Good thing it did too, makes propaganda and hatred a little more difficult to dictate in to the minds of an entire country.
Not quite the same as what you've linked to, but I used to have an old logitech split keyboard with touchpad that knew the difference between one, two or three fingers on the pad at the same time. I bought it maybe 11 years ago now. Was excellent for middle or right clicking. Died after several years of heavy use though. It was one solid keyboard, I miss it. :-(
I'm not posting as anonymous for obvious reasons, I'm a disgruntled ex defence signals directorate drone. I worked with quite a few domestic and foreign 3 letter agencies during my long stay with these characters. You are absolutely being deceived if you buy the little snippets of info you are given by your leaders.
Intel collection platforms are no secret, either in purpose or in functionality. The information is readily available to anyone attentive enough to cut through the crap. Google has it all. One thing I learned over the years is that individuals know what they are doing, management struggle to get another rung up the ladder and will do anything to look better than you, and the little boys club at the top have their politics. You know where these leaks come from? If you are a low level nobody then you go to jail, middle level managers get sent off to some red neck field site in the desert where they can't screw anything up much worse than it already is. So who does that leave you with?
If you are a creature of common sense and dispense with the patriotic blindness for a minute, you'll see that absolutely nothing stays secret. Nothing.
This is just plain old erosion of rights instigated by some fall guy in the executive branch who was probably just scratching someone elses itch.
The process is a little different to what you might think. These imagery birds produce a constant stream of pictures every time their solar panels are lit up with sunlight, a few less if in shade. Obviously areas of interest can be pinpointed as the satellite passes overhead, but these things rarely float around idle.
A warrant might give some imagery weenie the legal go ahead to distribute specific files, but that doesn't mean the pictures are only taken when a warrant is present. Over the years 'real time' has expanded to include 'sifting' through huge amounts of data storage to pick out not only a location of interest, but also a time of interest.
If the warrant doesn't include a time frame, then you can bet your backside it will be assumed to mean an unlimited capacity to view any imagery for the location of interest until the warrant expires.
Depending upon the acquisition method and storage, you might only have a few days of historical info, or you might have years.
Ex 3 letter agency drone typing.
Since c is most likely a constant we can say: something that is x light years away is y years old (actually, x = y for most cases, I think.
It seems illogical and improbable that X would equal Y. An object 4 light years away isn't necessarily 4 years old, it could just as easily be 4 billion years old. Unless the light from this galaxy 12.8 billion light years away just happened to come in to view on the Hubble sensor where a few moments before there was nothing, then that light could have easily been streaming past us for billions of years already. Who's to know?
I really don't understand the whole 'age of the universe' thing - there are still a lot of assumptions in those equations.
I guess you were making a slightly unrelated point :-) Anyway, Australia has had biometric passports since 2005, the application process is virtually unchanged from when I got my first 10 year passport in 1990. I can't even remotely begin to imagine how this erodes my rights in any way. I'm sure someone will enlighten me though. They take my name, date of birth, place of birth, my picture, then make a digital fingerprint of it which is stored on a chip wedged inside page 17.
All in all they ask for very little information. I have to give more detail just to get a video rental card, so aside from my travel history which is easily obtained anyway, there's no additional information that the ambulance chasers don't already have.
Do you have friends?
While you didn't say this - someone a couple of posts above you did. "Remember: the NSA are bumbling fools that couldn't lead two nuns in one minute of silent prayer" Speaking as a disgruntled ex 3 letter agency drone, I have to say that the conspiracy theories make for good movies, books, drunken late night stories, and that is all they do.
It's not necessary to make any assumptions, just a little critical and rational thinking will get you 90% of the way. Is it possible is a better question. Could a 3 letter agency have a large black tube that wraps around a bit of fiber and soaks up the noise of strained photons losing some energy by banging around a sharp bend? Does anything remotely similar exist in the commercial world? Have any physicists ever published papers on the subject? Can I buy a kit to do the same thing from radio shack yet?
Surprisingly, google, along with much corporate salivation at huge gravy train government contracts, has resulted in a lot of product specifications becoming well within easy reach of the comfort of ones computer. People don't keep secrets very well.
New and non-conforming will easily buy you a few years in the world of government bureaucracy and the child like stupidity of upper level managers. Always.
Why not use a subdomain if the site is for demonstration purposes? Seems like a complete waste of money and potentially good domain names. You register them and when they expire some idiot snaps them up and uses them for link farming.
It's not about a few dollars, it's about laying waste to the whole domain registration process. What good is it if the only thing left to register is a string of random characters.